Thurman’s spirituality was grounded not only in the beauties of the black experience, but grounded as well in the terrors of the black experience, as only someone living in Florida and Georgia could know them in 1915 and 1920 and 1930. At the same time, it was a spirituality that says: “And knowing all that, I also know that all human beings are one.”

This kind of strange combination of spiritual truth with hard political social truth led one young man in the 1930s to say this about Howard Thurman: “I’m disappointed in him. We thought we had found our Moses. And he turns out to be a mystic.” That’s the spirituality that gets people all riled up.

Not sure where the hell I’m going with this… been up tonight, mind going like a madman reading snippets of various tracts on the history of iconography, iconoclasm, representationalism, anti-representationalism, etc. Burges The Origins of Objectivity as well… strange amalgam to be sure… I find myself chasing ideas through weird rhizomes as if they were strange beasts in some illuminist manuscript, discovering patterns that might be nothing more than mad scribblings, or finding sparks in one thinker that seem to flash up again in another, each either revising, excluding, or absorbing the others notion and recreating it in a new concept or trope, metaphor or hyperbole. One works both for and against the whole tradition of interpretive strategies, using both forms and playing the one against the other till an idea either survives or is left standing amid the battlefield of other dead ideas. Believe me philosophy is full of dead ideas that have yet to vanish or be excluded. The war goes on…

Our current hierarchical view of ourselves and of our consciousness (with “I” at the apex, and “my ideas, my emotions, my experiences, and accumulated skills, etc.”, below) can now be shown to be fundamentally incoherent in a number of ways—the central contention being that in actual fact there isn’t and there can be no centre to our consciousness the same way that there is no centre to a river. Breaking away from the cul-de-sac of the this current/common hierarchical view, this chapter outlines a new model in which conditioned responses of memory—in the form of holarchically ordered, fundamentally interconnected basic assumptions and emotional attitudes—provide a continually shifting structure of consciousness (akin to the changing (infinite, yet finite) structural patterns which may arise in a kaleidoscope)..